"But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice."
-- Charles Darwin, Letter to Asa Gray

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Charge of the Light-hitting Brigade

Saturday is draft day for my fantasy baseball league. It is our 27th year, and I am the only member who has been there since Day One. For about 15 years -- through the 90s and into the zeros -- I was a league power, possibly *the* league power -- winning money about two-thirds of the time, about twice the rate chance would predict.

But I've been out of the money for three years in a row, which suggests it may all have been chance after all. Or maybe the Internet has caught up with me in just this sense. I have a little mathematical way of ranking players that seemed to give me an advantage back in the day. I was very good at finding bargains, getting players for a price lower than their actual value. If that was indeed an advantage, the Internet has undercut it, since the Net is filled with up-to-the-minute evaluations and draft lists and even suggestions of how much you should pay for players, given your league parameters.

I've tended to ignore the Net, fooling myself with the notion my pen-and-paper methods could beat the Net. And in recent years, pressures of the job have cut into my prep time.

Like this year.

Sigh.

Yet the draft itself is such great fun. There is much what some people would call horseplay and perhaps a certain amount of the sipping of adult beverages. I guess that's what I'll have to settle for, the process and not the result. Because tonight and tomorrow I am surely going to go online and Google "draft list" and "sleepers" and "injury risk" and hope for the best.

Oh I will keep you posted, frequently and proudly or seldom and rueful.

3 comments:

This year I managed not to get a Baseball Weekly (or whatever it's called now), neither did I get any of the printed Fantasy magazines. Also I didn't have the time to look anything up on the interwebs. I could do it now but I have to start making the marinade for the birria now. Oh well.